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51 4 SCIENTIFIC COMMUNICATION AND LITERATURE RETRIEVAL HOWARD D. WHITE Drexel University C O N T E N T S 4.1 Communing with the Literature 52 4.2 The Reviewer’s Progress 52 4.3 The Web and Documentary Evidence 53 4.4 The Cochrane Collaboration 53 4.5 The Campbell Collaboration 55 4.6 Recall and Precision 56 4.7 Improving the Yield 58 4.8 Footnote Chasing 59 4.9 Consultation 60 4.10 Searches with Subject Indexing 62 4.10.1 Natural Language Terms 63 4.10.2 Controlled Vocabulary 63 4.10.3 Journal Names 65 4.11 Browsing 65 4.12 Citation Searches 65 4.13 Final Operations 67 4.13.1 Judging Relevance 67 4.13.2 Document Delivery 67 4.14 References 68 52 SEARCHING THE LITERATURE 4.1 COMMUNING WITH THE LITERATURE Following analysts such as Russell Ackoff and his colleagues (1976), it is convenient to divide scientific communication into four modes: informal oral, informal written, formal oral, and formal written. The first two, exemplified by telephone conversations and mail among colleagues, are relatively free-form and private. They are undoubtedly important, particularly as ways of sharing news and of receiving preliminary feedback on professional work (Menzel 1968; Garvey and Griffith 1968; Griffith and Miller 1970). Only through the formal modes, however, can scientists achieve their true goal, which is recognition for claims of new knowledge in a cumulative enterprise. The cost to them is the effort needed to prepare claims for public delivery, especially to critical peers. Of all the modes, formal written communication is the most premeditated (even more so than a formal oral presentation, such as a briefing or lecture). Its typical products—papers, articles, monographs, and reports— constitute the primary literatures by which scientists lay open their work to permanent public scrutiny in hopes that their claims to new knowledge will be validated and esteemed. This holds whether the literatures are distributed in printed or digital form. Moreover, the act of reading is no less a form of scientific communication than talking or writing; it might be called communing with the literature. The research synthesis emerges at a late stage in formal written communication, after scores or even hundreds of primary writings have appeared. Among the synthesist’s tasks, three stand out: discovery and retrieval of primary works, critically evaluating their claims in light of theory, and synthesizing their essentials so as to conserve the reader’s time. All three tasks require the judgment of one trained in the research tradition (the theory or methodology) under study. As Patrick Wilson put it, “The surveyor must be, or be prepared to become, a specialist in the subject matter being surveyed” (1977, 17). But the payoff, he argued, can be rich: “The striking thing about the process of evaluation of a body of work is that, while the intent is not to increase knowledge by the conducting of independent inquiries, the result may be the increase of knowledge, by the drawing of conclusions not made in the literature reviewed but supported by the part of it judged valid. The process of analysis and synthesis can produce new knowledge in just this sense, that the attempt to put down what can be said to be known, on the basis of a given collection of documents, may result in the establishment of things not claimed explicitly in any of the documents surveyed” (11). Greg Myers held that such activity also serves the well-known rhetorical end of persuasion: “The writer of a review shapes the literature of a field into a story in order to enlist the support of readers to continue that story” (1991, 45). 4.2 THE REVIEWER’S PROGRESS As it happens, not everyone has been glad to do the shaping. In 1994, when this chapter first appeared, the introductory section was subtitled “The Reviewer’s Burden ” to highlight the oft-perceived difficulty of getting scientists to write literature reviews as part of their communicative duties. The Committee on Scientific and Technical Communication quoted one reviewer as saying, “Digesting the material so that it could be presented on some conceptual basis was plain torture; I spent over 200 hours on that job. I wonder if 200 people spent even one hour reading it” (1969, 181). A decade later, Charles Bernier and Neil Yerkey observed: “Not enough reviews are written, because of the time required to write them and because of the trauma sometimes experienced during the writing of...

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